cover image Great Women Travel Writers: From 1750 to the Present

Great Women Travel Writers: From 1750 to the Present

. Continuum, $26.95 (304pp) ISBN 978-0-8264-1683-4

This collection of 18th-, 19th- and 20th-century travel writing ""probes the diaries, correspondences, creative works and studies left to posterity by a diverse group of frequently heroic women,"" albeit in thoroughly uninspired prose. Editors Amoia and Knapp, who also collaborated on the biographical sourcebook Multicultural Writers from Antiquity to 1945, introduce readers to wanderers like Friederike Brun, a German author who spent so much time in Denmark that she once commented, ""To which people I actually belong, I really don't know."" The book devotes chapters to the lives and careers of novelists (and travelers) Edith Wharton and Anais Nin. It also includes sections on Oriana Fallaci-an Italian journalist who ""relentlessly recorded the suffering of soldiers and civilians alike in Vietnam, Lebanon, Greece, Palestine, Argentina and the Persian Gulf area""-and on Valentina Vladimirovna Tereshkova, the first Russian woman to journey into space. Despite the pioneering subject matter, however, most of the 22 essays in the collection are as compelling as an airport layover. Overall, the pieces tend to be dry, factual and marked by overly abstract interpretations (c.f., ""It will be my contention that the multiplicity of selves that Nin displayed in her cross-cultural and bicoastal lives is characteristic of the shape shifting that shamans perform""). As a starting point for readers looking to explore the subject, the anthology will serve quite well, but ordinary armchair travelers will probably prefer to catch another flight.